Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Get your old stuttering habit back, Jimbo?”

  “Only when I’m ner-ner-nervous.”

  “No reason to be nervous around me, podner.”

  “I’m out of the g-g-g-game now, with the Brancas leaving town.”

  “What I just tell you?”

  “That I got no reason to be nervous around y-y-y-you.”

  Cort Wesley just looked at him. “You mind if we come in?”

  Reluctantly, Farro held the door open for them, his gaze back on Cort Wesley, the mix of trepidation and anxiety in his eyes stopping just short of fear.

  “Interesting company you’re keeping these days, Cort Wesley.”

  “Well, I’m a changed man now.” Just as he finished three kids, two boys and a girl, none over the age of five, ran past for the foyer and charged up a nearby staircase. “Looks like the same can be said for you.”

  “Told you I was d-d-d-done,” Farro insisted, stiffening slightly again.

  “No worries from me there, ’specially with me being responsible for all this. I don’t push you on the Brancas, you’re still hacking high school computers to change kids’ grades for meal money.”

  Farro didn’t bother disagreeing.

  “So the thing is, podner, I need you to identify a certain computer chip for me.”

  “You try Radio Shack?”

  Caitlin watched Masters harden his stare just a little—enough.

  “They don’t owe me, Jimbo. You do.”

  58

  TERRELL HILLS, THE PRESENT

  Farro led them down into the basement, overhead lighting snapping on courtesy of sensors to reveal an array of computers and servers lining an entire wall. The machines were set atop a white platform that seemed an extension of the wall itself. Another smaller wall featured a variety of printers, fax machines and transmission relays, evidence of high-volume cold-calling. Caitlin didn’t bother considering what a man with the skills of Jimmy Farro was doing with all those phone numbers.

  “Show it to him,” Cort Wesley told her, wasting no time.

  Caitlin produced the chip salvaged from the hospital cable box and handed it to him.

  “What do you wanna know?” Farro asked, not impressed by what he was looking at.

  “Recognize it?”

  He started to hand the chip back to her. “Open up old cable boxes, you’ll find one of these inside. A dinosaur by today’s standards. Ten, twelve years old maybe. A relic. This what you came here to ask me?”

  “Not quite,” said Cort Wesley. “Want you to picture a chip about half, more like a third of the size. Same design, only lots thinner with green lines running through it forming some kind of maze.”

  Something changed in Farro’s expression, as if all the air had been sucked out of his cheeks. “Green lines . . .”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You’re bullshitting me, right? This s-s-s-some kind of joke?”

  “You’re stuttering again, Jimbo.”

  “Just answer my question.”

  “You ever known me to be a comedian?”

  “Not until today, no.”

  “What exactly did I just say?” Cort Wesley said, eyeing Caitlin now.

  “You have one of these chips, either of y-y-y-you?”

  “Nope. Saw one, though. Down at a ware house in Juárez that shipped a whole mess of them across the border and into Houston maybe five years ago.”

  “How many?”

  “Don’t know exactly. Four dozen crates maybe. You do the math.”

  Farro moved to a drawer, slid it open, and removed a chip that looked identical in all ways to the one Cort Wesley had seen dangling from the girl’s neck at the ware house. “Like this?”

  “Looks to be, yeah. I’d say almost definitely.”

  Farro held the chip before him, treating it like a gemstone. “Take a closer look.”

  “Green lines look a little off. Other than that . . .”

  “Other than that, exactly.” He redeposited the chip in the drawer and slammed it shut, turning his focus on Caitlin. “This a setup or something?”

  “No, sir.”

  Back on Cort Wesley now. “That how you got sprung from jail, telling the Rangers you’d cooperate with them?”

  “Yeah, that describes me to a T, Jimbo.”

  “You have any idea, either of you, what the chip you’re describing is exactly?”

  “As I recall,” said Caitlin, “that’s what we came here to find out.”

  “Cerberus. Sound familiar?”

  “Big three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell,” Caitlin answered when Cort Wesley remained silent.

  “Gates of hell being the operative phrase here and Cerberus being the name of the project, and the ch-ch-ch-chip, you’re referring to.”

  Cort Wesley ran his eyes over Jimmy Farro’s collection of custom-made computers. “You on the straight and narrow these days, podner?”

  “Less than most, I suppose.”

  “Making a buck on other people’s social security numbers—you must have that down to a science by now, especially with no Brancas to have to include in the split.”

  “What’s your p-p-p-point, Cort Wesley?”

  “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to your bread and butter, now would you?” he asked, running a hand along the sleek black frame of one of the computers.

  “I do something to piss you off?”

  “You’re getting close, podner. You got something to say, just say it.” Cort Wesley smiled, ever so slightly. “I mean, you’re among friends here. What’s Cerberus?”

  “Nothing before 9/11. The b-b-b-beginning of a new age after. You know everything you hear about warrantless wiretapping, shit like that?”

  “Yes,” Caitlin answered.

  “It doesn’t mean a thing, all smoke and mirrors to keep the country’s attention away from where the shit is really going down.”

  “Cerberus,” repeated Cort Wesley.

  “Different kind of guardian, equally hellish. I know since I’ve written similar types of code myself.”

  “And what kind of code is that, podner?”

  “The Cerberus chip, once installed into a computer, becomes a kind of data relay system,” Farro told them, in his element now, his chain of words unbroken. “Every e-mail, every word processing document, everything purchased on the Web, and every site visited on the Internet gets stored in the chip to be transmitted to a central server system—essentially a massive store house that captures everything a person does while they’re on their computer.”

  “Even if they’re not online?” Caitlin probed.

  “Doesn’t matter a hoot, Ranger. Because the next time they log on, everything they’ve done since the last time gets transferred. The central server then catalogues the information and searches on a constant basis for red flags in terms of terminology, locations noted, products purchased, sites visited or searches run. Forget Big Brother, my friend, this is Big Daddy. The ultimate in data mining.”

  “You’re telling me the government actually did this?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody outside of a select few do really. It’s always been an urban legend. They produced the experimental chips, like the one I just showed you, which worked just fine. But whether they actually went operational has been anybody’s guess.” Farro paused and sucked in some breath. “Until now, since you actually located one of these chips.”

  Cort Wesley shook his head, not buying it. “Five years inside The Walls I think I went online ten times maybe, so I’m no expert here. Seems to me, though, that lots of people would’ve seen these chips when they made repairs or upgrades.”

  “ ’Cept the chip you saw and the chip I just showed you hadn’t been cased yet.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Computer companies outsource their work to independent manufacturers. Identical chips get made for all of them but are cased to fit each company’s design and specifications. Once they’re snapped home, nobo
dy knows the difference or has reason to look.”

  “Say this was 2004,” Caitlin suggested.

  Farro considered the date. “Sounds about right. Three years after 9/11. It’d take that long to go from design to production to distribution.”

  “Where could chips like this be manufactured?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  “Lots of places.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Back then? I doubt it. Chip manufacture requires skilled workers in a sterile environment. We’re not talking about sewing seams on blue jeans here.”

  “But it’s possible, right?”

  “Plenty of it going on down there today, in fact, but those plants are all relatively new. So, sure, they could have manufactured Cerberus down there, but not . . .”

  “Not what?” Caitlin asked.

  “Answer her, podner,” Cort Wesley instructed when Farro remained silent.

  “It’s like this,” Farro said finally. “Cerberus wasn’t the only thing the government stuffed up its sleeve after 9/11. I heard rumors, stories, about something even more invasive maybe not right away, but not too far down the road.”

  His words left her stomach rumbling. “Like what?”

  “I don’t kn-kn-kn-know, Ranger,” Jimmy Farro told her. “And I don’t want to know.”

  59

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin found Rita Navarro, director of the Survivor Center for Victims of Torture, seated behind her desk staring blankly out the grime-pasted window. Still officially closed, the center was no longer considered a crime scene, allowing staff and volunteers to return to sort through the pieces of their ruined work and sort out what to do next.

  Caitlin stood in the doorway, waiting for Navarro to acknowledge her. Navarro’s long straight hair was tied back in a ponytail, pulled away from her face to reveal the ridged depressions beneath her pitched cheekbones, like cavities, that made her look sad and older as well as lost, the strain of the past few days showing in her dull eyes and chewed fingernails.

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlin said when Navarro finally looked her way.

  “What happened wasn’t your fault. You were almost killed yourself.”

  “That’s not what I was apologizing for, ma’am. I was apologizing for the fact that I lied to you.”

  Navarro’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “John Doe is my husband.” Caitlin waited for Navarro’s eyes to change, her point sinking in. “Peter Goodwin.”

  Navarro remained silent for several long moments before responding suddenly. “Your dead husband, you mean.”

  “A shock to me too, that much is the truth,” Caitlin told her and proceeded to lay out all she had pieced together from RevCom to Fire Arrow to Peter’s trip to Iraq that had left him ultimately in Bahrain. Navarro listened attentively, showing no emotion whatsoever, as if there was nothing left of her to feel. “I can’t tell you why I didn’t say something from the start,” Caitlin finished. “Guess it’s ’cause I knew you wouldn’t let me stay on the job if I told you the truth. And I had to try, I had to help him. When I saw him sitting there in that room, I knew I had no choice.

  “Yes, you did,” Navarro said simply.

  Caitlin nodded in concession. “You deserved the truth. You treated me square and I’m sorry for not returning the favor.”

  Navarro’s expression remained flat and unchanged. “I don’t know if I can reopen. I don’t know if I can face it all again.” Her gaze sharpened, looking professorial. Caitlin didn’t think she’d been wearing makeup the first time they’d met, but she needed it now. “I see you’re wearing a badge again.”

  “Seemed like a good idea under the circumstances,” Caitlin offered.

  “You killed men the other night. You’ve killed men before.”

  Caitlin nodded, a single time. “Not that I’m proud of it.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “Not particularly, ma’am, not when they’re trying to do likewise to you. For me, for lots of Rangers, that’s the way it’s always been.”

  “Part of the creed.”

  “If we want to keep at it, yeah.”

  Navarro’s eyes went distant again. “They brought me upstairs to identify the bodies. I haven’t slept since, not really slept. All I keep thinking of is how much they suffered, all they endured, just for it to end like it did. I’m having trouble living with that. That’s why I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”

  “That would be a shame, ’cause you’re damn good at what you do. You just never come face-to-face before with the type of evil that does the kind of things you’ve seen come through these doors.”

  “Never told you how I got into this, did I?”

  “No.”

  “Bunch of years ago, I was doing volunteer work for Doctors Without Borders in Sierre Leone. Happened to be there when the civil war there really heated up. I saw things I still spend every day of my life wishing I hadn’t. Spent two weeks on the run myself from both the rebel forces and the army. Hard to tell which was worse or who beat out the other in terms of depravity. I came to Sierre Leone a committed idealist and left more disillusioned than I’d ever been in my life. Watching a machete’s work will do that to you.”

  “You saw human nature up close and personal.”

  “And I resolved to do something about it. That’s how I was finally able to sleep again. Now the nightmares have returned and I feel like I’m back where I started.”

  “I know the feeling,” Caitlin told her.

  60

  SAN ANTONIO, 2006

  Caitlin couldn’t say exactly where things began to go bad for her and Peter; more likely, they had never really been good to begin with. Not that the blame lay with him. Thinking back on those years, Caitlin couldn’t find fault with a single thing Peter had done but plenty that she had. It was as if she was committed to sabotaging whatever chance their marriage had to succeed. Peter had proven patient, considerate—even overly so.

  She remembered a time at a county fair where she’d grown frustrated with him for no reason other than he couldn’t learn to shoot straight at a penny-ante midway gallery attraction. He had laughed; she had sulked. Her birthday was coming up a week later and he bought twin water pistols, insisting she try teaching him again.

  They seldom spoke of Peter’s work and not at all of her longing for the world of law enforcement she’d left behind. Peter kept the focus forward, on helping her find something else to throw her passion behind. Her success as a Ranger volunteer in schools led them to consider teaching, until the realities of pursuing that as a profession hit home. Peter had a substantial amount of money stashed away from profit-sharing arrangements with two software companies he’d been part of and offered to buy a business for her, any business. Caitlin recalled her father saying he wanted to buy a motel when he retired, but other than careers in various offshoots of law enforcement that was the only thing that moderately appealed to her.

  One day Peter took an afternoon off from work, insisting he had a surprise for her. He drove onto the campus of San Antonio College and pulled up in front of the main complex of buildings.

  Caitlin looked about, shaking her head. “I’m not interested in teaching what I don’t do anymore,” she told Peter, aware San Antonio College had a very well-regarded law enforcement training academy.

  “Not what I was going to suggest,” he said.

  “What then?”

  “The social Services department. You like helping people so much, why not turn it into a profession?”

  “You mean like counseling?”

  “I mean whatever you want it to be.”

  “Lemme think on it.”

  “Too late.”

  “Huh?”

  “I already enrolled you,” Peter said, reaching into the backseat and returning with a textbook in his grasp. “Your first class starts in twenty minutes. In that building over there, on the right.”

  61

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

&n
bsp; Rita Navarro sat still for a time when Caitlin had finished. “You got your husband to blame for being here.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it? ’Specially when you consider he’s here because of me.”

  “I don’t think I . . .”

  “Another part of the story,” Caitlin told her, leaving it at that.

  Navarro shifted in her chair. The desk lamp before her flickered then went out. “I’m thinking about buying a gun.”

  “Don’t recommend that at all, if you’re asking me.”

  “Think I’d feel bad about killing the kind of men I saw in Sierra Leone, the kind of men who came here the other night?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t. That’s the problem and it’s a road you don’t wanna go down. Trust me.”

  “It worked for you.”

  “Sometimes nightmares are better than nothing at all.”

  Their stares held for what seemed like a very long time. Then Rita Navarro let out the breath she’d been holding.

  “Thank you, Ranger.”

  “For what.”

  “Just thank you. But you didn’t come back here to counsel me, did you?”

  Caitlin finally came all the way into the room. “I’ve been calling you ‘ma’am’ but the truth is I should be calling you ‘doctor.’ ”

  “I’m a psychologist.”

  “That’s why I came back. Wanted to ask you some questions about my husband, his treatment.”

  “How is he?”

  “I’d say better, ’cept I’m not sure what that entails exactly.”

  “Cotard’s is tricky. Very difficult to treat. Wherever he’s been taken, they’re sticking with the medication protocol, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, Doctor.”

  “Rita’ll do.”

  “Peter’s doing some things the way he used to, mechanical things. I’m not really sure he realizes it’s him doing them, though, if that makes any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense.” Navarro smiled sadly. “I’m actually starting to believe you’re pretty damn good at this.”